Modern integrated circuit (IC) devices are required to provide support for feature-rich applications. Accordingly, such IC devices are required to achieve a high level of performance. In addition, modern IC devices are required to operate within strict thermal budgets. However, during periods of high activity, the power consumption of the IC device may be extremely high, resulting in the IC device exceeding its thermal budget if such high power consumption is maintained for a prolonged period of time.
To avoid the thermal budget for an IC device being exceeded, it is known to implement one or more thermal monitor(s) within the IC device, and to change an operating mode of the IC device to reduce power consumption, and thus heat generation, of the IC device if a monitored thermal reading exceeds a threshold level.
A problem with this conventional solution to avoiding the thermal budget of an IC device being exceeded is that a considerable thermal margin is typically required between the threshold level and the actual thermal budget level in order to allow for a reaction time required for changing the operating mode of the IC device. Such a thermal margin must be set for a thermal slope of a worst case scenario, since the actual thermal slope is not known. For example, such a thermal margin must be sufficient take into consideration variations in ambient temperature, IC device process corners, product specific attributes such as, say, product ‘box’ dimensions, ventilation, etc. In addition, such a thermal margin must be sufficient for all use cases and IC operations. Thus, in the majority of cases such a thermal margin is greater than actually required, reducing the performance of the IC device unnecessarily early in realistic use cases.